Thanks for allowing a scruffy Texas populist to join you here at “The Summit” for this uptown, down-to-earth, back-to-basics populist-palooza. It makes me happier than a mosquito at a nudist colony to be looking out at you unabashed, untamed progressives. Thank you for fighting on behalf of America’s workaday majority, who’re being kicked out, knocked down and stomped on by the bosses, bankers, big shots, bastards and bull****ters. They seem to think they’re the top dogs and ordinary people are nothing but fire hydrants, so, again, thank you for standing up and speaking out against their plutocratic power plays.

I know it isn’t easy in the House to make these fights. Wow—what a menagerie of Koch-headed, right-wing, GOP mutants you have to mess with! It’s enough to make you feel sorry for poor ol’ John Boehner. He’s as confused as a goat on AstroTurf! What a hoot it was to watch him hype the Republicans’ stripped-down immigration bill recently, but have to declare it dead less than a week later because his Tea Party swarm turned on him. Then he blamed Obama for their recalcitrance. After all, he couldn’t admit the truth, which is: “My members are bull-goose, howl-at-the-moon lunatics!”

Take Steve Stockman… please! A certifiably insane, far-out right-winger representing a Houston suburb, he actually put out a re-election bumper sticker that says (and I’m not making this up), “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.”

Nothing is too extreme for that bunch, and too much never seems enough for them. When I see them going full-tilt goofy, I think of some advice I got as a teenager: in sex, using a feather can be erotic. But using the whole chicken—well, that’s just kinky.

As our friend Bill Moyers said about them and their agenda, “The delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe to sit in the seat of power.”
Well, that’s their problem. But we Democrats are facing a big question of identity, too. Who will we be? Will our party be the home of populist, grassroots Democrats (both “little-d” democrats as well as big-D Dems)? Or will it be a bastion of Jamie Dimon–Wall Street Democrats?http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...vival_20140412